For its scale, speed and brutality, this was the most spectacular implosion in the modern history of English sport.

To slide from 3-0 winners of an Ashes series to 5-0 losers inside five months is unprecedented in the cycle of rise and fall to which most teams submit.

A great book cries out to be written, not packed with outrage but rich in detailed reportage about a very human tale.

The self-image of a previously good side is shattered. In this hour of savage self-reproach they will feel they are none of the things they thought they were.

All the power, all the popularity England believed they had built up from previous exploits has been ripped away from them by a zealous Australia side, who are not in the same class as the 2006-2007 team, who also whitewashed England.

The tome would set out the mix of circumstances that produced the vortex of a 5-0 crushing.

It would acknowledge Australian aggression and improvement. It would bend the knee to Mitchell Johnson’s 37 wickets and Brad Haddin’s 493 runs.

It would remind its readers that Australia’s batsmen scored 10 hundreds to England’s one.

It would pat Darren Lehmann on the back for restoring the yard-dog spirit of Australian cricket.

But then it would turn its gaze to the individual and collective disintegration of the England squad and their support staff, including coaches and analysts at all levels.

The trouble is, publishers would probably recoil. Who would want to print a story of such unremitting bleakness?

The marketing departments of publishing houses would point to the despair that swept across English cricket here as each daybreak brought fresh news of a Johnson rampage, a Kevin Pietersen brain-freeze or a mid-series retirement.

Yes, more than ever Graeme Swann’s early exit speaks of a failure to stick together and fight by a team who made much of their “unity” before Michael Clarke’s men smeared them across the grass of five Australian cities.

Though it may never see the light of day, pretty much every aspect of this sporting life would be examined in a manuscript that sought the truth about Pietersen’s self-absorption, the scrambling of Alastair Cook’s mind, the torments endured by James Anderson in a land without swing, the enfeebling of Matt Prior, the pressure heaped on Joe Root and the attempt by Swann to portray the end of his international career as a selfless gesture.

With dramatic licence, you could say Jonathan Trott’s return to England after the Brisbane Test was not only a product of his “stress-related illness” but a foretaste of what was to come.

The bare statistics are: England lost by 381 runs, 218 runs, 150 runs, eight wickets and finally 281 runs with one last capitulation that hinted at a kind of spiritual ruin.

Only those who were there can tell us whether England “threw in the towel” in Sydney, as some have suggested.

There is no comparable case of an English team unravelling so fast, and with so few “positives” to fall back on (Ben Stokes is one).

England were favourites to win this series. Australia were 100-1 to win 5-0. England had won the past three series and four of the past five.

Clarke’s men had lost seven of their previous nine Tests.

Though this Australia team have improved substantially since the summer, the 2006-07 vintage that wiped out Andrew Flintoff’s lot could still call on Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, Mike Hussey, Adam Gilchrist, Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee and Matthew Hayden, however close those idols were to retirement.

Few teams across the spectrum of sport escape boom and bust.

In rugby union New Zealand have entered one of those phases when success appears self-perpetuating, when an All Black starting XV just seems to evolve on an endless supply of new talent.

Spain’s footballers won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and then Euro 2012.

The more general pattern, though, is for good sides to ascend, plant a flag on a peak and then smile at the cameras for the inevitable descent.

England’s cricketers, on the other hand, took the fast road to disarray.

The cricketing reasons are easy enough to understand. England’s susceptibility to quick bowling was obvious.

So was Johnson’s brilliance. His 37 wickets came at an astonishing average of 13.97.

Accuracy alone will not achieve those kind of figures. The batsmen need to be terrified too. And England’s batsmen were.

Seldom in the history of sporting conflict between two nations have we seen a set of truths laid down early and then hammered home over weeks.

The story never changed. It was a nightmare from which England never awoke.

At least in 2006-07 England managed to reach 551 for six in their first innings in Adelaide. We know what happened next: calamity.

This time, after a reasonable first day of the series in Brisbane we saw England assailed by technical, intellectual and emotional chaos, with no one able to stop it.

Recent Ashes history makes no sense.

The swing from the summer is too great for us properly to comprehend because it takes us beyond mere sporting factors into a vast realm of psychology, team spirit and character.

Flintoff has spoken of his depression on the 2006-07 tour.

One wonders at the private thoughts of captain Cook and his men now and how they will suffer with the results from these five Tests slung permanently around their necks.

England rose to No1 in the world, briefly, won a Test series in India and had their foot on Australia’s neck from 2009 until the late summer of 2013.

At the same time they have been whitewashed by Australia twice in seven years, which suggests a weakness at the heart of the game in these isles.

Ask the question about great implosions and many will cite English rugby’s woes after the 2003 World Cup win, when everything was focused on winning in Australia and there was no exit strategy.

The future would take care of itself. Except it did not.

The following summer, England lost twice in New Zealand and once in Australia. They lost again to Australia at Twickenham in the autumn.

But those results were consistent with mass retirements and a lack of planning.

This time we see one team’s improvement juxtaposed by the caving in of a side who had become insular, attritional, complacent and detached from the reality Australia threw at them.

They were bamboozled and swiftly demoralised.

Endlessly fascinating, but deeply cruel, this was the story of a group of people who can count themselves lucky that defeat in sport comes with one redeeming feature: the chance to make amends.

Some of them, though, will not get that opportunity, and they will be haunted by their memories, however good life was before.